S&P warns 1 in 10 US firms may default on debt | Hacker News Reader

S&P warns 1 in 10 US firms may default on debt

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23 pointsfinphil13 comments

They didn't save for the hard times? It was their own choices that caused them to default. They should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Of course, companies should save to face possible hard circumstances. In ideal world.

In real world, conservative company that save large portion of their income will loose competition with a company that does not have this kind of infinite game thinking.

The events that really test and reward companies with infinite thinking are rare and far between, allowing those without that kind of constraint to flourish inbetween.

Now, it depends what is thought to be public good. It might be in public (US) good to give aid to those companies to keep being competitive against foreign powers. Even though you may not like the fact and you may think it is not fair to reward short term thinking it might still be in your good interest to pony up.

I don't have knowledge and mental model to decide whether this is in fact good or not. Somebody should probably do some kind of estimation of possible effects to figure out what is the right course here.

> it might still be in your good interest to pony up

It's not in our good interest, but yes, it is indeed in our masters best interest, so that's exactly what they're going to do. Socialism for wealthy corporations, rugged individualism for the rest of us. That's how it works here in the US.

For the record, I'm not hating companies that live day to day, the race to the bottom forces them to. I'm mocking the idea that if you struggle financially, it's always your fault and you should have known better. There are always factors out of our control, company or individual, even if bigger entities have more factors under their control.

A company that has too much debt but is otherwise viable can go through the bankruptcy. Ownership is transferred to the debt holders and equity holders are wiped out. Companies that aren’t viable will have their assets sold off to other companies that can make better use of them.

Dozens of airlines have come and gone over the last 50+ years but the planes didn’t just crumble to dust. Protecting companies that aren’t financially viable from bankruptcy doesn’t avoid losses but just increases the misery. The only benefit is spreading it out over a longer period of time and to different groups.

It's kind of amazing that 10% of our economy is basically living on the knifes edge of revenue and liability like this. It might just be a bad mentality, I know in Japan, they have a tradition of corporations building up a massive treasury, but the US is basically the exact opposite

I don't think 12 months without revenue is "living on knifes edge"

That's kind of the problem. We don't view companies that go 12 months without revenue as high risk and/or failed investments anymore. How long can companies like Uber continue to raise capital to operate when they're only generating a fraction of the revenue now and investors won't accept the long term risk?

As long as money is cheap, the rich (VCs, Angels) will throw cash at you to satisfy their tax liability. A unicorn going public is just a side benefit.

I think it'll be amazing if only 10% of US firms default on debt in the next year or so.

But Japan hasn't been doing really well either. They've been in a recession for like 30 years straight.

The source article:

https://www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/research/articles/200204...

From their earlier article:

https://www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/research/articles/200317...

Did they swap numbers by accident? I expect 9 out of 10 to default.

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